Episode #181 – One Awesome Thing I Learned From A Con Man

On this episode Russell talks about what he learned from a known con man, Kevin Trudeau. He also gives you an idea of what his new book, Expert Secrets is about.

Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:

What Russell has learned from Kevin Trudeau.

When Russell learned to “What if…” instead of “No.” and what that has taught him.

And What Russell’s new book, Expert Secrets will teach you.

So listen below to hear what difference saying “What if…” has made in Russell’s life.

Full Episode Transcript

Hey, everyone, good morning! This is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of Marketing In Your Car. Hey, everyone. I can’t help but laugh every time I do that. But anyway, there you go. I have no other way to do an intro, so that’s all I … I need to go to intro school and learn some other cool stuff, but for now that’s what I got. I’m driving past my house and there’s this huge alfalfa field next door to us, and usually every morning … Today there’s not, but there’s like 500 geese in there and then deer, big deer with antlers and everything. We count about 7 deer that, every morning, come through our yard and then at night they go back the other way. It was pretty cool.

All right, so I got something cool for you guys today. Some of you may know I’ve been writing my second book. I swore I’d never do it again but here we are. I felt like there was one more message I needed to share with the world and the book is called Expert Secrets, and I really feel like … In fact the intro of the book I talk about is this the prequel to DotComSecrets or the sequel? Where does this fit in the queue? It kind of depends. If you’ve got an existing business, I think DotComSecrets is the first book. If you don’t then Expert Secrets is the first book.

If you have an existing business though, I think Expert Secrets is the second book. It gives you a very systematic, step by step timeline of what to do and what order to do it in. I’m excited. I feel like, it’s kind of like when a weight loss author writes a diet book. I was thinking about Dave Asprey wrote The Bulletproof Diet. Here’s the guide. Here’s everything that he knows about losing weight. That’s kind of what DotComSecrets was like. Here’s everything. Then the next book they usually come out with is the cookbook, like, “Hey, here’s the Bulletproof Cookbook. Here’s all the recipes you should use.” That’s kind of how this is.

This book feels like it’s my recipe book, like, “Okay, so all the stuff we talked about in DotComSecrets, you want to implement it… What order? What comes first? Why?” Thinking about things like attractive character. You start here and you transition to here, and which funnel do you use first, second, third and why do you use them in that order? All those kind of fun things. I’m excited. It’s turned out really really good. We’re I think about a third of the way done with it and I was really nervous to write this, because there’s been a lot of people that have written things on how to become an expert and stuff like that and I didn’t want it to be another one of those books. I wanted it to be something special, and so it took me forever to figure out how I wanted to do it and structure it.

I feel like we’re there and it’s turning out cool, so I’m proud of it. With that said, there’s a lot of cool things I’ve been thinking about while I’m doing that. I’m going to talk about one of them today. It’s a concept I might have talked about on the podcast in the past. I don’t know. I’ve done so many episodes I can’t remember everything that I say so if this is a rerun for the hardcore ones, this is something to just keep thinking about. But a long time ago I bought a product by … I’m going to blank out his name now. He’s the dude that … Kevin Trudeau. Kevin Trudeau, who’s in jail right now, but one of the best infomercial pitchmen in the history of time, and someone who I do not agree with his ethics.

He’s done a lot of bad things to a lot of people I care about, but from a skill standpoint, dude’s amazing. He came out with a product a few years ago called Your Wish is Your Command. In the product he acted like he was in Switzerland and there’s all these kings and stuff he was teaching to. It was all BS. He recorded it in a studio in Chicago, and so it’s kind of like the whole product is based on a lie, but the content actually was really good. Take that for what it’s worth. But one of the things that Kevin talked about in the product was a thing I’d never heard about, but he called it the teachability index, and I talk about this in the Expert Secrets book a little bit. But he talked about, if you think about in your life when you grow up, right?

When you’re a little kid you’re like a sponge. My Norah, today she took 3 steps. She’s just learning how to walk, our little 10 month old, and she’s like a sponge. Everything she’s doing … She took a step and we’re going crazy and she’s doing little things. Kids are so teachable. Look at my kids right now. Anything they touch they just figure it out, like video games or math problems. Anything we give them, boom, they figure it out so fast, so much faster than us adults ever do. You look at that’s how life is. We’re growing, we’re evolving, we’re learning. All these amazing things are happening, and we do it through elementary school and then junior high, then high school, then college, and then some horrible thing happens at the end of college. It’s the worst thing that can happen to any of us.

We get a degree, and that degree means, “Congratulations. You have learned everything you need to learn and you’re smart.” Guess what happens to almost all the population at that point? We all stop. We’re like, “Sweet. I know what I need to know. Let’s go into the workforce now and implement what I learned in school.” The thing that sucks about that first off is that the school system’s horrible, so you didn’t learn half of what you need to know, but second-off, our teachability index drops to almost nothing. I got in that slump just like everybody else where I thought I knew everything, and that’s why I think I fell in love with this whole business, because I started learning and it opened up my eyes.

But, the same thing happened, I opened up and I started learning all this stuff and doing it and started making money, and then what happened? I started teaching it and then boom. It was like I had graduated. I know what I need to know and I kind of shut down for a couple of years, which was horrible because I stopped evolving, stopped growing. It was kind of like this stagnant point for me, and the real turning point for me was when I went to a Tony Robbins event. I remember sitting there at the event, and people are jumping around, going crazy, and singing and dancing and he’s sharing all these things.

For the first 5 or 6 hours, I’m sitting there with my arms folded like, “No. I’m not dancing. I’m not jumping. All that stuff he’s saying is BS. I don’t believe it.” I really kind of shut things off, but Tony’s got a way, and he’s pretty good at what he does. After about 5 or 6 hours, I remember I had … For me, I don’t think at the time I thought it was a breakthrough, but I was kind of like, “You know what? Screw this. I’m going to jump around and be happy because everybody else in here is except for me.” I started jumping around and being happy and then I started thinking, “Instead of me saying no, Tony’s wrong, what if I just say what if? Let me just change the thought in my head from no to what if.”

I did, and he started saying something. Instead of me immediately shutting it down like all of us do, because we’re educated and because our teachability index is zero, instead of doing that, I said, “What if?” What happened has been life changing for me. It’s opened up this whole new world of possibilities and ideas, and things and people, and experiences that I never thought were possible before. For me now, I’m very careful to not say no when new ideas come to me. It’s not that I can’t say no after I’ve investigated them and prayed about them, and learned about them and implemented them and tried them and tested them, but I try not to say no initially.

I try to say “what if” and then put it to the test and see. The things that are good come back and can be really, really good. A good example of that, when I started learning about all this, the high fat diets, and at first my brain’s like, “No. Eating a stick of butter is not a good idea. No. My whole life I learned butter’s bad.” Okay, this morning … I ate more butter this morning than I ate probably in the first 25 years of my life and guess what? I’m in the best shape of my life. Not the best shape of my life, when I was wrestling I was in way better shape. I’m not going to lie, but the best shape of my adult life. I’m losing weight like crazy. I’ve lost a pound a day every day for the last 5 days.

It’s interesting and it all came off of a “what if”. What if this whole thing that we’ve been thinking was true this whole time wasn’t true? What if butter actually is amazing and wheat is bad? No, it can’t be … heart healthy wheat. Anyway, I started changing that and again, it’s transformed my world. I look at my business and it’s no longer stagnated. It’s dramatically growing every single month. I looked at my relationships, I looked at all these other aspects of my life, and as I shifted my responses from “no” to “what if”, it changed everything. What I’ve done is I’ve basically increased my teachability index. I’ve opened myself up to learning again, and most people don’t.

In the book what I’m talking about, and this is kind of my message for you guys today, is as we get into whatever our business is and where we consider ourselves an expert. We’re either an expert doing what you’re doing or teaching it. Some of you guys are teachers as well, but a lot of us, our teachability is zero and we’re kind of teaching what we’ve gained so far in our life, and I think that’s wrong. When I was hanging out with Howard Berg, the world’s fastest reader, one the of the first times I was hanging out with him, I asked him his opinion on God because I want to … He’s read over 30,000 books. The dude’s a genius, right? I was like, “What’s your opinion on God?” He’s like, “Well, you know, a lot of people will read one book on a topic and that becomes their truth.”

He said, “For me, I look at that as one author’s opinion, so I like to read 10 or 20 or 30 books on a topic and then I get a whole bunch of people’s opinion and I have the ability to see the whole picture and then from there make my choices.” He would go on like, “This is what these guys believe and this is what these guys believe, and this is what this …” He started sharing … It was insane. If you ever meet Howard Berg ask him for an hour of his time and ask him his thoughts on God, because it was fascinating. It was the coolest thing in the world. Any topic you ask him and he can go into that like, “Oh, well most people read one book. I read 40 on the topic. This is what I think.” He’s just like, “You get a holistic picture as opposed to just a fragment.”

I think for us as educators, as experts, as whatever you want to call yourself, it’s time to open back up your teachability index and become a student again. Become obsessed with it. In fact, the very first thing I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, I call it the Expert Maker Funnel, and it’s doing a telesummit or some type of a summit, because in that summit, you transition from whatever you are to … Your attractive character profile becomes the interviewer. In that interviewer role, you have a chance to interview tons of other people. It’s just like reading 50 books. Interview all these other people and suddenly what’s going to happen is your picture of your reality is going to change. It’s going to grow. It’s going to become way better.

I think that it’s time for all of us, if we really want to serve our people at the highest level, it’s time to transition away from being the leader all the time, and become a student, and really open your teachability. Because you’re going to learn and gain so many things you can help your people with that you couldn’t just by sticking with all that you’re doing right now. That’s my message for today. You’re going to love the book. It goes so much deeper than that. There’s so much more which I could share, but we’re at the office, and I got to get to work and help try to serve some more people, get this message out because I think it’s important and it’s worth sharing. That’s what I got for you guys today. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.